Saturday morning marked memorials for two people.

The first is Rabbi Don Singer. Don, who died some 5 years ago, was one of Bernie’s Zen successors, vivacious, joyous, and effervescent, the life of the party. His joy was infectious everywhere, be it on a street retreat in New York, at retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and certainly in weddings and sabbaths. He danced. If you wanted to be surrounded by love and laughter–and many did–you wanted to be next to Rabbi Don all the time.

Edna Winston was way quieter, as out of sight as Don managed to be in sight, as silent as the grave in which she’s lain for some 43 or 44 years, and as the years go by, her image in my psyche and imagination only grows bigger.

In my mid 20s I did administrative work in a downtown NYC law firm while my first husband went to graduate school. My desk was at one end of an old suite of offices, I rarely went in back because the only one there was an elderly, stooped lady (she was close to 60) typing wills and codicils at an electrical typewriter, practically invisible behind the cigarette smoke. Her brown-gray hair was tied in back with a hairclip, her small, compact body shrouded behind a gray cardigan winter and summer, her head buried in her typewriter, rarely making eye contact. When she did, blue eyes looked out at me vigilantly. If I said good morning, she muttered something inaudible back.

I rarely bothered going to the back office.

One day, out of the blue, I suggested we have lunch together. What does out of the blue mean? What inspiration, what unconscious reason caused me to do that? I don’t remember what was said in that one hour, only that I invited her again and again, usually for thin, flat hamburgers in a cheap downtown restaurant. Slowly, slowly, I coaxed out her story.

She came from a Jewish Brooklyn family whose parents sent her brothers to college but not her because she was female. Like so many others after World War I, she joined the American Communist Party. Those were heady days for radicals of all kinds, but especially for socialists and Communists, inspired and enthused by Stalin’s Mother Russia, convinced that their job was to bring about the great revolution to the capitalist United States. Edna went to Columbia, not as a student but as a cafeteria worker, and unionized all of Columbia’s food service employees.

She was successful and passionate, an autodidact who immersed herself in literary classics as well as political science and philosophy. She also married Henry Winston, a black man from Mississippi who was to become chairman of the American Communist Party. She knew them all: Gus Hall, Earl Browder, Henry Wallace.

Theirs was one of the early inter-racial marriages, with ensuing calumny and hazard. They had two children; he was rarely home. Finally, Henry Winston and other top party leaders were arrested and tried for conspiracy to overthrow the government; they escaped while on bail. His wife, raising two children on her own, was threatened by phone calls and letters, and constantly followed by the FBI. She divorced her husband and began to drink.

She loved her years with the Communist Party, as did so many others. It offered a grand vision, and she toiled and labored, ready to give up everything for it. “I knew what was happening in Russia under Stalin long before Khrushchev admitted it publicly,” she told me, looking over her shoulder and keeping her voice low, as she always did. “But the Communist Party was everything for us.”

Eventually, she found Alcoholics Anonymous and stopped drinking. She became a sponsor to many and took me to their open meetings. She lived in a small studio in Alphabet City in New York, next door to the police station because it was a rough neighborhood in those days. There was little furniture in that small room, just walls lined with books. “We were sure that the US would turn Communist, it was inevitable.”

She smoked incessantly, insisting it was the only pleasure left to her, and finally contracted lung cancer. I visited her at Lenox Hill Hospital several times till she died in the early 1980s.

Some people make a big impression from the first: bright, educated, well-spoken. Edna Winston hid in back of a law office, typing away for her livelihood, so accustomed to self-concealment that she told me to hush whenever I asked her anything in a normal voice. “You never know who’s listening,” she’d tell me, before mics and cameras in computers, before cellphones or AI.

What was the miracle, the karma, that brought us together? I had grown up with very little sensitivity to economic injustice, feminism, or racism. After the Holocaust, all my parents wanted was to join the middle class and live safe lives as Jews; anything more universal made no appearance in our home. I read about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, wrote my first poem about the four black girls killed in Birmingham’s 16^thStreet Baptist Church in 1963, but it felt a world away.

Edna, hiding away in the smoky recesses of a Wall Street law office, taught me what women could do in this world, the meal they could cook even with few starting ingredients.

At that time, I thought that I wanted to hear her story because, after all, I was a writer and people’s life stories fascinated me, still do. Many years later, joining Bernie and the Zen Peacemakers because they were the only socially-engaged Buddhists around, I realized that they were watering and fertilizing a seed that had already been planted in me.

What act of grace created this connection between her and a much younger, naïve, colossally ignorant woman? I don’t have a photo of her anywhere except in my memory.

When she died some 45 years ago, I didn’t understand the loss—or the gain. As so often happens, I appreciated her more in her absence than in her presence. She trusted me with her life story, which gave me life, too. When I look back on all these years, I know I can’t possibly give sufficient thanks to that short, muttering, gray-haired woman typing wills and codicils in the backroom of a law firm that is long gone, keeping her thoughts to herself, shrouded in white cigarette smoke.